Moving to Tenerife was a life-changing experience

Discovering Tenerife in the Canary Islands and moving there changed my life in a big way. I conquered my fear of flying.

Fear of flyingUntil 2002 I had a real fear of flying and had never been in a plane. This meant I had spent nearly all of my life in Britain and most of it in Ely, in Cardiff in Wales where I was born, apart from travelling to Ostend in Belgium by ferry in 1971.It was all to change though when I went to Tenerife for the first time on a holiday to meet my friend Priscilla Hernandez.

How I conquered my fear of flying

Aerophobia, aviatophobia, or aviophobia

Priscilla is a singer-songwriter, musician and also a fantasy artist specialising in fairy pictures, and I had become friendly with her having met online on the old mp3.com website for independent musicians.

I had seen photos of Tenerife where Priscilla lived and also learnt a very small amount of Spanish from her and I really wanted to visit so readily accepted her invitation to do so.

When I say "readily" I mean that I really wanted to but I nevertheless knew I was terrified of flying. I knew that somehow I would have to get over this fear. The phobia of being afraid of flying is also known as aerophobia,aviatophobia, or aviophobia, but whatever you want to call the problem I had it!

Priscilla told me I would love seeing the "sea of clouds" and that I would be fine. She has a song called appropriately Flying and it has the lyric: "Dare to fly..." and so I thought, why not? I would dare to fly!

Actually Priscilla was right because as soon as I was actually onboard the plane I was fine and enjoyed the experience. Then when I got off at the airport in Tenerife South I felt straight away as if I had at last found the place I was supposed to live. It really felt that way.

I had to get a bus up to the north to meet my friend, and even though I ended up going past the stop I should have got off at and so had to get off and get another bus back, and even though it was pouring with rain in the north, and even though I found out that my knowledge of Spanish was of not much help at all, I still felt that the island was saying to me that this is where I should come and live.

Hostal Berlin in La Laguna

Where to stay overnight in La Laguna

The Hostal Berlin pensión

La Laguna square

Plaza and Dragon Tree in La Laguna

La Laguna where the university in Ten...

La Laguna in Tenerife

Tenerife's university city

I was staying in a pensión in La Laguna and even though I had no TV, no PC, no phone, no CD player, no video but just a room with a bed and a cupboard and table, chair and sink and access to a shower, I was happy with that. It was my base in this new country and where my adventures would begin from.

The week went by so fast and I fell totally in love with the island. I found lizards and bees everywhere and amazing Dragon Trees and all sorts of other exotic plant life and I spotted some Monarch butterflies, an insect I had only seen before in books and online.

I came back to Tenerife for a second holiday in the spring of 2004 and it confirmed all the feelings I had had the first time I visited the island. In the December of the same year I made the big move and have not regretted it in any way at all. So, for me visiting Tenerife led to a life-changing experience in getting rid of a phobia and it inspired me to abandon the country of my birth and start again on a Spanish island.